Fishing Report - River Colne, Essex - 25th April 09

blakdog on Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:56 pm

It was a reasonably good tide on Saturday night and with a good weather forecast I decided to try Bateman's Tower for a few Bass. Its a good venue for something sizeable and silver on the bigger tides particularly this early in the season, when the better fish haven't worked their way up the river. Favoutite bait on the river has always been Ragworm but I'd noticed the previous day that there were a lot of spent ragworm on the mud, indicating that they had spawned recently and so I had reason to be optomistic that Ragworm would be the favourite for a fish.

Fishing with large Ragworm, Peeler and Sandeel baits I was into fish as soon as I arrived at about 11pm, although not the fish I was looking for ... just small Bass, Pouting and Whiting. I missed a lot of tiddler bites on the flood due to the size of the baits (and the hooks) but landed enough to keep my interest up until about an hour before the top of the tide when I leant into a cracking bite on Peeler which resulted in me getting a Bass of about 1 - 2 lbs to the edge of the concrete before it shook off the top hook of the pennel and disappeared.

Things went quiet over the top as usual with a couple more tiddlers and then about an hour and a half down another good bite, this time to Ragworm, saw things go a little smoother for me and my first sizable Bass lay on the concrete - not massive by any means but about 2lbs and certainly nothing to turn your nose up to on the Colne given that the Bass generally run fairly small here.

I ended the night at about 3am with about half a dozen each of Pouting and Whiting and a couple of small Bass as well as the better one. I probably could have caught a mass of tiddlers as it was a bite a chuck but I just don't do small hooks and baits when I'm Bass fishing, I really don't see the point quite frankly if you are looking for better fish. Mind you this strategy does come costly on bait as I used 1lb of Ragworm, 25 Peelers and 2 packs of sandeel without trying that hard.